by Ian Whates
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. I began fumbling with the buttons of my own coat, my fingers big with cold, my thoughts already far away, two stops down the line, with Raya safely ensconced in the women’s waiting room at Vasilievsky while I hurried away from the station and headed back to where I needed to be, at the city’s centre, where a part of the world was getting ready to immolate itself and who knew if survival was possible and what it might entail. “Look, you see, you can wear mine instead. You’ll be warm in Mummy’s coat, won’t you?”
Rae smiled as if I’d offered her a present, the bad moment forgotten as she shifted towards this new one, and the prospect of something unexpected and, in its comical way, special. The coat was too big for her of course. It looked ridiculous, but it would keep her warm, it would become its own world. That was all that seemed to matter in that moment. That my scent be wrapped around her, like a protective shield.
The tram was packed, more crowded than was usual at this time of day. “Hold on to me,” I said to Raya. I found myself imagining how it might feel to lose her in the crush, the sudden realisation, the panic. I forgot about my lack of a coat almost at once, it was so warm inside the carriage. Mainly I was just desperate to get to Tamara’s place, where there would be a radio, and coffee, and Alyosha. We would talk, we would do our best to make sense of things, we would decide what to do.
We were all afraid, but there was still room for doubt. I don’t think any of us believed that it would really happen.
The train was slow, slow, slow, and time seemed to be moving faster with each new minute. I tugged Raisa along by the hand, steering her briskly through the crowd outside the station entrance, thinking all the while about Alyosha and what we were proposing to do – about the Americans and the Party, and our own private situation with Pamela that seemed liable to explode at any moment.
We hurried across the station concourse to the women’s waiting room. The stove was lit, and I briefly considered taking back my coat – my hands were freezing – but decided against it. What if the fire went out? I would only worry. And I knew Rae loved my coat, with its cherry red skirt and shiny black buttons that were made to look like jet but were really just glass. She called it my pal’to barabanshchika, my drummer boy’s coat, like the one in the story she liked by Olga Grin.
I hoped the coat might comfort her in my absence. An idea born out of cowardice, but I clung fast to it anyway.
“Where are we going?” Rae said. She was scared, I could see that, but I pretended not to. If I granted this knowledge admittance it would overwhelm me, all my careful plans would fall apart. I would be gone for an hour, perhaps two. What could possibly go wrong?
“We’re going to Baba’s, remember? On the train? I need to go and see Auntie Tam first, but I won’t be long. Just wait for me here, okay? Whatever happens, stay in the waiting room and don’t move. There’s a nice fire, look. You can sit here, next to this lady. I’ll be back very soon.”
I wrapped my arms around her then, pushed my big cold face into her small hot one, pressed my eyes closed as I kissed her, so I wouldn’t have to see how afraid she was. The woman on the bench beside her – a heavyset, pasty-faced woman with the most extraordinary fur collar (I hadn’t seen a fur coat like that in years, not since my grandmother had to pawn her best clothes at the end of the war) scowled at me disapprovingly. She was holding her gloves in her lap, her pudgy hands nestled together like plump pigeons. I wanted to seize those hands, with their deep creases and gaudy rings (the kind of rings, set with foil-backed paste instead of gemstones, that are used as theatre props or in cheap cabaret, and I realised that yes of course I recognised her; she was an actor, I’d seen her onstage as Madame Arkadina in The Seagull). I wanted to beg her to please watch over my little girl until I got back, see she doesn’t wander off, amuse her with stories, stop her being frightened, but I didn’t. It would have been too much of an admission. That what I was doing was dangerous, and – worse – that I knew this better than anyone, better than she ever could, but that I was going to do it anyway, because I was still convinced, even during those last moments, that I would get away with it.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO Rae’s original clothes?” I asked Clara. “The clothes she was wearing when she was found?”
Clara made a face. “They were taken away for forensics to have a look at. I doubt anyone’s got round to it yet, though. They have a backlog a mile long, and there was no suggestion of foul play. I expect they’re in store.”
“Do you think I could get a look at them?”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe nothing. Would you mind keeping this to yourself until I have something more concrete?”
“Sure.” Clara shrugged. I asked her how Rae was, and she said fine, although I could tell by the way she said it that she was unhappy about something. That her time with Rae was running out, most likely – Clara loves kids. Anyway, she let me use her phone to call the lock-up and half an hour later I was there, cooling my heels in the front office while old Victor Dirnychev hobbled around in the evidence store trying to locate the articles in question. Finally I was called through to what was supposed to be an atmosphere-neutral examination room but was actually just a windowless cubby hole in the basement.
“Here they are,” Dirnychev said. He never says much, Dirnychev, but he’s all right once you get to know him. He had three evidence bags laid out on the table. One contained a child’s grey woollen pinafore dress. The second bag contained the coat. I barely needed to glance at it to know this was the same as the garment described by Vanessa Chubin in her memoir. The sight of it brought a lump to my throat. I felt like calling Lyuba then and there, telling her I’d done it, I’d found Rae’s mother.
The only problem was that the mother was dead. She’d died in 1969, before Rae was born.
I smothered a laugh. The third bag contained a pair of shoes, a child’s zip-up sheepskin boots. The toes were heavily discoloured, coated all over with a greyish dust. Masonry dust, by the look of it. The kind that hangs in vast clouds above a city after it’s been bombed.
“How long will it take to get these tested?” I asked Dirnychev. “If I get a permission slip this afternoon, I mean?”
“About forty-eight hours, if you’re lucky.”
I made the expected grumbling noises – that it was too long, there must be a way to speed things up, all the usual stuff. In fact I wasn’t too bothered. I knew already what they would find, and I was right.
Forensic analysis of Rae’s sheepskin boots detected faint but definite traces of radioactivity.
“SO WHAT ARE you saying? That this child, this Raisa Chubina, is a time traveller?”
Not many people could have asked that question with a straight face, but Paula isn’t most people. She listens more than she speaks. I would be the first to admit I probably take advantage of that.
Except that now I’d finished my story I was finding it hard to say anything at all.
“I think it’s the station,” I said in the end. “Vasilievsky. You know the bomb never touched it? Say if – I don’t know – it became lodged in time somehow. And Rae – Rae just stayed where she was, waiting for her mother exactly as she was told to. For her it’s still the day of the bomb. It’s everything outside the station that’s moved on.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you? Things like that don’t happen except in films.”
“I don’t know, Paula. All I can say is that I’m not making this up. The coat is real. Rae’s boots are real. Are you telling me it’s just coincidence, just chance?”
“What else can it be?”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I’d been awake most of the night, mentally examining each and every aspect of what I’d discovered in minute detail until I could actually feel my mind sliding out of control. I finally fell asleep, just for a little while, at around six o’clock. I was woken by a gimlet ray of sunshine, stabbing me in the eye like a steel needle. I
had a sudden and perfectly clear insight into how it must feel to go insane.
“I’m sorry, Paula. I don’t mean to have a go at you, but there’s more to it than that. I know there is, and I mean to prove it.” I tried to smile. “Occam’s Razor, remember?”
“You’re not going to Lyuba with this, are you?”
“Not yet. I need to think.”
“No,” Paula said. “You need to let this go. Not everything in this life is about the bomb, you know. Rae isn’t your brother.”
I jumped inside my skin when she said that, then went cold all over. Peter is one of those subjects we never talk about.
SO THERE ARE supposed to be these places – nexuses – where planes of time meet, or converge, whatever. Where a certain building or patch of woodland or street or factory yard, instead of being altered by time, or eroded by it, is carried over, uploaded, rendered time-neutral. You’ll find an awful lot has been written on this subject once you start digging. What it boils down to is that certain places stay the same.
As Vasilievsky Station had stayed the same, in spite of being close to the centre of a nuclear strike. I had no idea if the place had been a time-nexus before the station was built – probably, just harder to notice – but it was definitely one now.
That was what the books told me, anyway. And the articles, and the internet forums. When my research first started clicking together, my main worry was that no one would believe me. The more I delved into the strange world of alternate physics the more I came to realise that I’d been wrong about that, there were hundreds out there – thousands – who would leap upon my story with the fervour of newly minted religious converts. University lecturers, discredited scientists, New Age philosophers, mystics, prophets, inmates of mental asylums, damaged young mothers and burned-out grandfathers. I found this discovery both enlightening and profoundly depressing.
I returned to Vasilievsky Station, watched the crowds ebb and flow as the trains came and went from the long platforms, wondered at the stark winter sunshine, flinging itself to its death from those ridiculous corkscrew towers. I was waiting for something to happen, I suppose. I have no idea what. At the end of an afternoon’s continuous staring, it began to seem to me that I was always staring at the same crowd, the same faces, endlessly repeating, like one short sequence of film stuck in a loop. I gazed at the teeming figures, remembering one of the texts I had stumbled across, a pamphlet that made repeated references to something called a probability wave, an article of quantum physics suggesting that an object or even a person might be shown to exist in two places at once. The kind of theory that would interest Alec Ostrov, no doubt. I couldn’t make much sense of it myself.
I realised I had either to own this or, as Paula had suggested, let it go. I thought about the reams of strangeness I had read through, the roster of misfits and recluses and oddballs who had written them down. They could have been born crazy, I supposed, but I seriously doubted it. They had probably started out just like me.
IN THE END, the decision was made for me. A couple identifying themselves as Rae’s parents came forward to claim her.
Their name was Bryusov and they were from Omsk. They said they’d been travelling home from a visit to Rae’s grandmother, in Nizhny Novgorod, when Rae went missing.
“We were all so tired, you see,” Gavril Bryusov explained. “Our first train was cancelled, and we’d been waiting around on the platform for almost six hours. Sonya and I were having a nap in our compartment. Raya was with us, or so we thought. She must have woken up and gone exploring, you know how kids are. We weren’t too worried at first. We thought she must be on the train somewhere. Of course when we found out what had happened we were frantic.”
The train had made stops at five different stations, each an hour apart, while Sonya and Gavril Bryusov were asleep. It had taken them days of desperate phone calls and enquiries before they discovered their daughter’s whereabouts. Eventually they were directed through to Lyuba. They were back in Omsk by then, and it was a further eighteen hours before they were able to catch a return train. Clara was there to meet them at Vasilievsky Station.
“The man sounded drunk,” Clara said. “Relief, I suppose.”
“What about Rae?”
“Didn’t say a word. Just ran to her mother and buried her face in her stomach. She was crying.”
“Who? Rae?”
“No, Sonya Bryusov. They had Rae’s full ID on them, the works. Raylina Gavrilovna Bryusov, born 19th October 2002. There was a photo and everything.”
She fell silent. She was still missing Rae, I could tell. After a couple of minutes of neither of us saying anything, I asked her if she’d asked the Bryusovs about Rae’s coat. I thought she might have forgotten about that, but she caught on at once.
“I did, actually. They said the red coat belonged to Rae’s sister, Liza. Liza went away to university recently, apparently, and now Rae won’t let the coat out of her sight. Insists on wearing it, even though it’s miles too big for her. She misses her sister. Poor kid.” Clara sniffed. “It was funny about that purse thing, though. They downright refused to let her keep it. Said it might have germs, or something. I had to promise the kid I’d look after it.” She paused, then opened a drawer of her sideboard and drew something out. “Here it is.”
She handed me the purse. This was the first time I’d seen the real article, and I could understand why the Bryusovs hadn’t been keen on taking it away with them. It was a shabby thing, the leather cracked and stiffened, unpleasant to touch. The material securing the zip had almost worn through.
I opened the zip and looked inside but the purse was empty. The inside smelled musty and faintly rotten, the way all leather begins to smell if you don’t take care of it properly.
A COUPLE OF days after Rae went home I called in at the precinct to speak to Lyuba but she wasn’t there. On an impulse I went downstairs to see old Dirnychev instead. Victor Dirnychev has lived his whole life within one mile of the city centre. The bomb left him buried in the rubble of his apartment block for almost two days.
I asked Dirnychev if it might be possible for anyone walking around the city now to pick up radioactive dust on their shoes.
“In one of those old warehouses out by Karl Marx, say. Or at Vasilievsky Station.”
He frowned, apparently in concentration, picking in between his teeth with a paperclip. “I’ve heard that it is,” he said. “Stuff like that takes a long time to go away, doesn’t it? They say it’s mostly harmless now, anyway.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I suppose I do.” He took the paperclip out of his mouth, flicked it across the countertop and onto the floor. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s that you have to hope for the best. What choice do you have? You’d go mad otherwise, wouldn’t you?”
ENDLESS
RACHEL SWIRSKY
Rachel Swirsky is an American literary, speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, and editor living in California. She is the winner of two Nebula awards and her work has been shortlisted for Hugo, World Fantasy, Tiptree, and Sturgeon awards.
TERRIFYING CRUSH. BODIES on bodies pressed. My open mouth, trying to scream, filling with smoke. Unbearable heat behind, blazing us forward. Our backs growing hot beneath long, wool dresses, a precursor of what’s to follow.
We knock aside sewing machines. With muffled clatter, they fall amid piles of discarded fabric. Beneath me, someone’s scream pierces the chaos. My foot is on her chest. Bone snaps under my heel. I try to run forward, get off her, but so many people. I’m shoving in place. We’re all shoving in place. Me and the girls behind and the girls in front, everyone who can stand, battering the blockades of flesh between us and something that might be safety.
Elevator doors snap shut on a load of lucky, half-burned girls. We pound closed doors with our fists. Someone manages to pry one open. People force forward. Screams echo as girls pitch down empty shafts.
Push to change directi
on. Manage it despite bodies crammed together as densely as iron walls. More girls beneath my feet. Cries of pain syncopate with sounds of stomping feet.
Consuming it all, the roar of fire, following behind us so closely that its searing maw has consumed everything in our minds but red.
Then, in front of me: clean, white daylight. An open window. Something shifts the press of bodies. Someone has jumped, leaving behind a body-width of space.
We scramble, claw, to take her place. Fire catches our skirts, lights our hair like candle wicks. The strongest push through to the ledge. Smoking-flaming torches of fire plummet.
I’m not the strongest, but I’m strong enough to rush behind. No hesitation, not even a thought for the forthcoming fall. The fire has pushed me forward like the hot hand of a giant and I will do anything to get away.
Sick vertigo flood, but oh, relief of air gulped in lungfuls. The smell of my own flesh, cooking. The falling. The falling. Broken body bursts against the sidewalk, thud and dead.
ONE-HUNDRED-AND-FORTY-SIX GIRLS DIED in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire after owners Harris and Blanck locked the stairwells.
Back again.
CLAMOR FOR THE door, but this time, the push-and-press lasts only a second before I’m on the ground. Feet all over me. Toes. Heels. Leather and sweat. Body cracks. Ribs, vertebrae. Delicate finger bones, pop, pop, pop.
Someone’s foot on my chest. Girl I was before? Maybe.
Small this time, so small. No way to keep upright in the stampede. Nowhere near strong enough to fight to the elevators, to the windows. Tiny things are crushed down here at the bottom of the world where the screams fall.
